Newburgh’s website hacked; police action may be sought

NEWBURGH, Maine — Newburgh’s town website apparently has been hacked, the town manager said on Monday.

“If you’ve been to our website, you’ll see it has been compromised,” Town Manager Serena Bemis-Goodall said during Monday night’s board of selectmen meeting. “There’s a lot that’s gone.”

Many pages on the website were changed or missing on Monday.

The website was hacked sometime Friday night, said Bemis-Goodall. Town elections were held on Friday and the town meeting was on Saturday.

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She said Kelly Hamilton, a first responder for the town, noticed the changes on Friday night.

Only four people had logins to the website, said Bemis-Goodall — herself, Hamilton, former selectman Chris Yountz and Jay Taplin, who previously hosted the website. Now only Bemis-Goodall and Hamilton have access.

Bemis-Goodall made it clear that she didn’t believe anyone with a login to the website was responsible for the issues.

“That’s not saying anything about anybody else, but I told her to change everything. So she changed her password [and] my password,” said Bemis-Goodall. “We’ve taken the steps to do what we can.”

Hamilton was in the office on Monday afternoon trying to recover as much information as she could, said Bemis-Goodall.

On Monday night the website was down briefly. Bemis-Goodall believed that Hamilton was working at home to restore the website on Monday night and that was the reason for it being down. It was back up a short time later in the evening.

Bemis-Goodall said after Monday’s meeting that she intends to contact the Maine State Police’s Computer Crime Unit.

“I want to find out who did it, how it happened and what to do to prevent it from happening again,” Bemis-Goodall said after the meeting.

Bemis-Goodall said she was most upset about losing pictures from the town, which were not recovered.

“I am going to ask anybody and everybody if they have some photos they’d like to share of Newburgh to send them to us so we can actually put some of the pictures back up,” said Bemis-Goodall.

She also said she was disappointed to see months of work lost so quickly.

“When I came on [as the town’s administrative assistant in October], our website didn’t look that great. That was one of the first things I jumped on, getting our website so it looked more up to date and had more information. We worked on that a lot,” said Bemis-Goodall.